Lough Erne Yacht Club

News > Prince, Admiral and Yeoman

Created: 12/13/2009 5:47:50 PM, Updated: 12/13/2009 6:12:01 PM

An LEYC sailor’s contact at 2009 Cowes Week reception with Prince Phillip revives memories of the Prince’s early sailing experiences with Michael Chrichton, late LEYC Admiral.


Historic artifacts at LEYC include a painting of both in the royal sailing yacht Bluebottle, a model of her, and a Yeoman.

After WW2 the Yacht Racing Association, defying post war austerity, sought to revive pre-war yachting. When Princes Elizabeth and Prince Phillip married, their wedding present from a major yacht club was a Dragon class racing yacht, Bluebottle, Sail 192. Persuading Prince Phillip to become Patron, the YRA was renamed Royal Yachting Association, today’s RYA.

The Prince was a naval officer, likewise a friend Michael Chrichton, with much racing experience. He asked to and became Royal Sailing Master, managing Bluebottle and racing with Prince Phillip at regattas around the coast, drawing welcome attention to yachting.

The painting behind LEYC bar, west wall, shows Bluebottle, Prince Phillip helming, Michael Crichton crew, with his white yachting cap, and her startling rig of red white and blue sails. Early Terylene sail cloth’s dull cream colour was rejected by yachtsmen, preferring pure white traditional Egyptian cotton. Promoting Terylene, the manufacturers gave Bluebottle a free main and foresail, dyed red and blue, and a white nylon spinnaker. This startling sail plan has puzzled many a stool-sat pundit at LEYC bar in recent years.

With the wedding present came the small builder’s model, hull, rig and fittings beautifully detailed, in a glass case with a citation on the back panel. It went to Michael Chrichton, when his term as sailing master ended and with him to Fermanagh in retirement. In the 1980s he presented it to LEYC. It was prominently displayed in the then new bar and for over 20 years after.

Bluebottle herself was donated to Dartmouth Naval College, then more recently to the Cornwall Maritime Museum, where she is active afloat - sails boring white Terylene!

About 2005, the whole LEYC display was taken down. The model survived in a corner of another glass case amid club shirts. Two British delegates here at 2006 J/24 World Council, who had sailed Bluebottle as Dartmouth cadets, were excited to see it and the painting. Sir Robert Knox Johnston, associate of the Cornwall museum, was likewise intrigued on a 2005 Erne visit. Today the model is in the Committee room.

Michael Chrichton revived LEYC sailing at Crom in the 1950s in Snipe dinghies that had also raced there in the late 1930s. They joined the main LEYC fleets at Ely for regattas. In Bluebottle days, Michael had been made honorary member of several Dragon racing clubs. In the 1960s he became an honorary member of LEYC, and thus of the UK’s most westerly and its most easterly club, Royal Norfolk and Suffolk YC.

Thus well aware of Norfolk’s neat new keelboat, designed for inland waters, he brought the first Yeoman to LEYC, and named her Crista after a daughter of the King of Spain whom he met when they were in exile in London during the Spanish civil war – a romance thwarted by posting him to the China Station, chasing pirates in an RN insect class gunboat on the Yangtze River.

Years later, Crista was followed here to make a new fleet, whose roots weave down the years to the story of an Admiral who asked a Prince could he sail his Dragon.

LEYC Admiral Michael Chrichton was buried in Derryvore in January 1997 beside another historic LEYC figure, ‘Squire’ Gartside Tipping, whose son, inventor of the fin keel, donated the Squire’s Cup, a trophy raced for each autumn by the J/24 fleet at LEYC for over a quarter century past. Michael’s grave stone has a representation of him sailing alone in a small keelboat, as he so often did from Christa’s mooring at Ely.

Michael Clarke, LEYC Historian.